A Court Affair Read Online Free Page B

high, arched windows, yet one more reminder that monks once made their home at Cumnor, for two hundred years or more, before King Henry ordered the dissolution of the monasteries and cast their cloistered inhabitants out to fend for themselves in a confusing and frightening, often unkind world. Before Cumnor fell into private hands, my spacious apartment was divided up into several stark and tiny monks’ cells furnished with only the bare necessities—a hard-as-a-board cot to sleep upon, with a chamber pot hidden underneath, and a crucifix looking down on its occupant from high upon the wall, to remind him that God is
always
watching us. Sometimes I fancy that I can still see their faint outlines, like the ghosts of those banished crosses haunting their former home. In spite of myself, I smile and blush a little at the thought that a monk’s cot might even have sat right here where I sit now, naked in my bath.
    No doubt to the simple country folk hereabouts it seems like the height of extravagant folly or absurdity—like the French king’s mistress bathing in a tub filled with crushed strawberries to preserve her famous beauty—my rising when it is still as black as tar outside to take my bath. Many already think me a woman of a strange mind. But it’s a soothing and peculiar kind of peace, to sit in a candlelit bath while most of the world still sleeps, and I like it, and even though I am naked, I feel less vulnerable somehow. I like the quiet solitude of sitting in my bath, luxuriating in its warmth undisturbed, before the sunrise and the busy bustle of the day begins, hours before there are voices downstairs and outside the windows, the clatter of cart wheels and horses’ hooves in the courtyard, the laughing, joyfully raised voices of children playing, servants calling to one another, and footsteps and chatter in the Long Gallery outside my room where I used to walk up and down before I became so weak, and below stairs the gossip of servants and the crash and clang of kitchen pots. Though Cumnor is in reality four separate households under a shared roof, and I keep to myself most of the time, the other ladies who lodge here are more social creatures than I, and each thinks that
she
is the queen bee here, and over this entire hive reigns. There is the ancient Mrs Owen, the mother of Cumnor’s owner, Dr George Owen, who, like the mouse who bravely pulled a thorn from the lion’s paw, received it as a reward for his attendance on King Henry’s sore and seeping leg; and the plainspoken, sometimes tart-tongued Mrs Forster, wife of Sir Anthony Forster, my husband’s treasurer, who holds the current lease on Cumnor; and his mistress, the widow Mrs Oddingsells, one of those rare women who seem to grow more attractive and alluring as they age. My servants dart about Cumnor like busy bees doing whatever they are told to do regardless of who gives the commands; sometimes they don’t even have time for me, they are so busy doing Mrs Owens’s, Mrs Oddingsells’s, or Mrs Forster’s bidding. But I let it go; I am too tired to complain, it would take more strength than it is worth, and I just don’t care any more. Besides, I like being here with only Pirto to attend me, free from the fear that some well-intentioned or curious maidservant will come knocking and catch a glimpse of my pain-racked body and ruined left breast when Pirto opens the door, or will even boldly cross the threshold and ogle me, while pretending not to, so she can tell the others what she has seen, as she delivers a stack of fresh linens or a package from my husband containing a pretty piece of apparel to lift my spirits, or the latest doctor’s or witch’s brew calculated to restore my health or more likely hasten me to my grave if I were fool enough to drink it. With rumours rife in London and spreading throughout the land, and even across the sea, that Robert and his royal paramour mean to poison me, I would be a fool to let any potion he sent